100 Responses

better work stories...I think the police have no idea about people just muddling through, we see someone just coping, they want to see some master criminal or conspiracy.Perhaps vindictiveness replaces their lack of vindication...

I talked to a few Crown Prosecutors about the case.To them Switched on Gardner were selling equipment and making tens of thousands in profit. Equipment that the owners knew was to be specifically used for gowing cannabis which in some cases they argue, would then be on sold.

You know what's highly ironic about that? Some of the equipment seized in Operation Lime was later onsold at police auctions.

Therefore, they say, prosecution was both necessary and worth while regardless of the cost.

It wouldn't have been so bad if police and prosecutors had communicated that the practice that had let SOG trade and advertise for 15-odd years was to change, and let the owners and managers make their choices. Instead, police embarked on an expensive, nationwide operation that made aggressive use of search warrants and undercover officers -- and yet didn't anywhere near live up to its billing in the end.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if police and prosecutors had communicated...

One imagines that more money and time spent on liaison and education with specific groups, and the community at large, could have an immensely beneficial affect on'offending' and decisions leading to those behaviours, and therefore saving money on policing resources and community impacts.It has always bugged me that while the State takes the stance that 'ignorance of the law is no defence'. they never actively initiate any meaningful introduction to, or education on, the law or Civics in general.

the things ya see when ya haven't got a gun...Tangentially: I was appalled to find an A3 glossy christmas catalogue from Gun City in my suburban Shirley letterbox, yesterday...

I wonder if the disconnect between the draconian consequences of being convicted of participation in an organised criminal group and the actual facts of what the accused have got up to is leading to juries simply refusing to convict?

But I don’t know why anyone who watches reality TV police shows would really be surprised at the pointless waste of taxpayers’ dollars the switched on gardener case represents. Waging war on drugs? You might as well try and wage war on liquorice allsorts.

I watch those police/border reality shows from here and Australia, and all the sanctimonious lecturing of the voice overs can’t disguise the utter futility of the amount of time the police and customs spend busting small time drug dealers. The cost to the taxpayer must be prodigious, surely far more than treating it as a medical problem and employing more doctors and nurses and councillors would ever cost. Yet what does all that massive use of authoritarian power mostly net? Old ladies trying to make the pension go a bit further, louts looking for a quick buck, larrikins caught with a tiny or a baggie in their car, a stoner dude supplementing his minimum wage job in a gardening centre, a couple of teenagers at a music festival – that is who the police mostly catch. None of the nickel and dime stuff really justifies the loss of our liberties, invasions of our privacy and draconian sentences that in its impotent fury the state imposes on us all. The futility of the body armour and the assault weapons and the helicopters and the lavish use of manpower without regard to cost is really what these reality TV shows present to a thinking viewer.

But these shows, like the switched on gardener case, do tell us the cops are as addicted to illegal drugs as any dead beat street addict, because without drugs the need for all those flash undercover operations, the guns, the helicopters, indeed the very centrality of the current importance of the police as a state agency, would pretty much vanish as well.

And that I suspect is really the answer to the question “to what purpose….?”

do tell us the cops are as addicted to illegal drugs as any dead beat street addict, because without drugs the need for all those flash undercover operations, the guns, the helicopters, indeed the very centrality of the current importance of the police as a state agency, would pretty much vanish as well.

The institution of the police has that view. But individual cops are much more nuanced, I think. The ones I know have, after all, taken dope themselves at much the same time their peers were doing it. They know the whole thing is a waste of their time and they would certainly rather be doing more valuable police work. Indeed, more than a few would welcome decriminalization so they could have a smoke occasionally, without fearing the end of their careers, and so that every person who does smoke dope that they ever knew, which could be quite a large proportion, doesn't disassociate with them. It's lonely enough being a cop.

You talk about drugs with serving cops? Would you light-heartedly joke about how you are able to rig the bill to your advantage in Italian restaurants in New Jersey with low level mafia hoodlums as well?

The real problem with treating marijuana use as a health issue, rather than a legal issue, is that they then have to deal with alcohol as a health issue and, as we saw with the latest round of suggested reforms on alcohol use and sales, this government has no interest in going there.

I suppose the law of unintended consequences would see THC laced softdrinks being hawked by major breweries at every corner dairy, on the grounds they don’t need a liquor license, while the National government pretended there wasn’t a problem with that.

I wonder if the disconnect between the draconian consequences of being convicted of participation in an organised criminal group and the actual facts of what the accused have got up to is leading to juries simply refusing to convict?

I wonder too. It's also worth noting how unimpressed judges have been with some police actions in this case.

I have smoked with police officers to be, current and former not just talked about drugs with them. I expect a lot of people at this site have also had similiar experiences. To see a police officer fail to uphold a law surely devalues other laws, although I never thought any less of the officers themselves who'd been put into a crap position of upholding obviously futile and pointless laws. I expect that 95% of MPs speaking privately on their own behalf don't agree with the law as it stands [lets not mention P Dunne and his ilk], but acknowledging and changing this will probably be driven from outside Parliament as it's too much of a political hot potato.Even Nandor Tanczos flew quite low in this regard so as not to inhibit his other ambitions regarding Parliament.With you 100% Russell in that the police could have dealt with switched on gardener more effectively by meeting with the principals to find a resolution to their concerns.Probably this sort of action could be effective in a lot of other cases saving time and money also causing less criminalisation of our citizens whilst enhancing their standing in the community. I note that other regulatory agencies already do this, Commerce Commision, Health and Safety etc.

You know, the cops don't actually have to enforce every law on the books to the maximal extent possible. In fact, that's just as draconian and unjust as selectively refusing to enforce the law. In general, there's discretion, and cannabis crime is a classic case where discretion really should be exercised.

I watch those police/border reality shows from here and Australia, and all the sanctimonious lecturing of the voice overs can’t disguise the utter futility of the amount of time the police and customs spend busting small time drug dealers. The cost to the taxpayer must be prodigious, surely far more than treating it as a medical problem and employing more doctors and nurses and councillors would ever cost. Yet what does all that massive use of authoritarian power mostly net? Old ladies trying to make the pension go a bit further, louts looking for a quick buck, larrikins caught with a tiny or a baggie in their car, a stoner dude supplementing his minimum wage job in a gardening centre, a couple of teenagers at a music festival – that is who the police mostly catch. None of the nickel and dime stuff really justifies the loss of our liberties, invasions of our privacy and draconian sentences that in its impotent fury the state imposes on us all. The futility of the body armour and the assault weapons and the helicopters and the lavish use of manpower without regard to cost is really what these reality TV shows present to a thinking viewer.

In general, there’s discretion, and cannabis crime is a classic case where discretion really should be exercised.

It's exercised all the time -- the police don't wade in and make arrests at J Day, they periodically overlook marijuana sales and consumption at the Daktory, and they may or may not overlook minor possession, depending on how they're feeling that day. Jenny Shipley made it an offence to sell cannais paraphernalia, but you can still buy bongs all over town.

There's a reason for this: zero-tolerance policing of cannabis laws would make prohibition untenable.

The problem is that when prosecution is so often discretionary, you get what happened to Green Cross and Stephen McIntyre, and OTT events like Operation Lime. It's not a good formula.

That's hardly entire story - the Police quite frequently turn a blind eye to laws they can't be bothered enforcing. There were a vanishingly-small number of prosecutions for sodomy before the Homosexual Law Reform bill, most of which were actually about sex in public places and child molestation.

No, this ridiculous amount of money and energy spent on cannabis control is essentially about easy news stories and a bunch of pumped-up guys who enjoy running around with guns and choppers (not so much the criminals).

Bust 'breaks cornerstone' of cannabis industry : nzherald linkthis article states .. Once police knew who was buying the gear, they launched more stings to catch their targets in the act of growing and selling drugs.

i guess its a moot point how they gathered their targets - whether through surveillance of the shops or access to SOG computer records - but it certainly did happen as an immediate result of Operation Lime.

i too doubt it meant frontline beat cops were less likely to pick on poor brown kids, even taking into account a new 'warning' system, which was for 'cleanskins', that was also piloted in auckland around that time (subsequently 'rolled' out nationwide).

i do know those post-Lime busts netted a number of small very genuine medpot users - older, richer and paler - growing their own supply, who had to face the courts, and that is just the few that i know Norml found out about.

You talk about drugs with serving cops? Would you light-heartedly joke about how you are able to rig the bill to your advantage in Italian restaurants in New Jersey with low level mafia hoodlums as well?

Hey we talk to all kinds of people here.Frinstance. My old mate Osama like to knock back the Vodka when we were in Afghanistan working for the Company. Here's a story. When we were on Hell week during our Special Forces training, we were doing a 12 hour drown-proofing exercise, I can tell you that bugger did the full 12 hours with just one bottle, taking a gulp every time that big old bearded head broke the surface. And could he handle his piss, hell yeah. Top bloke.